Robert has persuaded me that limiting warming to less-than-disastrous levels won't work without massive investment in removal technologies.

So pleased to see you say that DWill, since as I mentioned at the recent thread on Changing People’s Minds, and as the opening post here explains regarding the tribal nature of belief, persuading anyone of anything is extraordinarily difficult and rare.

To recap on climate, we have added a lazy trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the air, preparing an earth-shattering kaboom, as Marvin might have put it. The climate orthodoxy of cutting emissions, as expressed in the recent IPCC report and this dubious Nobel to Nordhaus, says don’t worry about all that accumulated carbon, just slow down the speed at which we are adding more fuel to preparing this great bonfire of our vanities. The IPCC report goes so far as to say we can ignore major feasible methods to fix the climate just because some people don't like them on purely emotional grounds. That is pure tribality, a capitulation of reason to the mob.

Climate is a security emergency, not a second order political debate. The idea that the security emergency can be solved without active collaboration with the fossil fuel industry is a farcical tragic joke.

DWill wrote:

At the same time, though, renewables have to be aggressively increased, because it will take a few decades for carbon removal to be feasible at scale.

There is a serious opportunity cost in renewables. If our goal is climate stability and restoration, the funds and effort we invest for that purpose should be applied to the activities with greatest ecological rate of return. Unfortunately that is not renewables, which have been sold on the basis of lies. Wind and solar are great for pollution control but very slow as a way to stop our planet turning into a hothouse.

My view is that the single best opportunity is to conduct field trials on adding iron to the ocean, as I have explained at my new website ironsaltaerosol.com. Disturbingly, my experience is that I get the totschweigen wall of silence treatment from the renewables brigade. They can’t argue on facts so their preferred tactic is simply to ignore arguments that refute them, like the Pope arguing with Galileo.

DWill wrote:

The damage that fossils will do in the meantime can't always be erased through later carbon removal.

Why do you say that? It is true that coal emits mercury which causes permanent damage, but the main permanent damage is caused by the temperature rise of climate change, especially biodiversity loss and the risk of several dangerous switches getting thrown that we don’t know about. The best way to stop those trigger points is by stepping back from the precipice by pulling carbon out of the air.

DWill wrote:

One point that might be ignored is that, despite advanced oil and gas extraction methods, fossil fuels won't be in sufficient supply to maintain the enormous energy flows the world economy depends on. Renewables are needed for both environmental and economic reasons.

The world has several hundred years of coal reserves, but as McKibben explained in his 2012 Rolling Stone article Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, burning the reserves that are factored into the stock prices of the fossil majors would send us on a one way trip to Venus hell, temperature-wise. The only way fossil fuels can avoid the Kodak corporate extinction fate is by working out how to remove more carbon than we add to the air, and using that removed carbon for productive commodities – fuel, food, feed, fertilizer, fabric, fish, forests. I still don’t have much of a sense that they realize the severity of the predicament.

Growing algae on 1% of the world ocean, with high yield industrial production fertilized by emissions piped from coal fired power stations, would in my view enable a sustainable world economy and climate repair.

The climate orthodoxy of cutting emissions, as expressed in the recent IPCC report and this dubious Nobel to Nordhaus, says don’t worry about all that accumulated carbon, just slow down the speed at which we are adding more fuel to preparing this great bonfire of our vanities. The IPCC report goes so far as to say we can ignore major feasible methods to fix the climate just because some people don't like them on purely emotional grounds. That is pure tribality, a capitulation of reason to the mob.

But I thought the latest from the IPCC did acknowledge the need for removing carbon. I have not read the report, but one summary has this to say: "The UN's latest global warming report made it clear that if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, society urgently needs to move away from fossil fuels completely.

But to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report says, we'll also have to figure out how to undo some of the damage that's already been done.

The damage that fossils will do in the meantime can't always be erased through later carbon removal.

Why do you say that? It is true that coal emits mercury which causes permanent damage, but the main permanent damage is caused by the temperature rise of climate change, especially biodiversity loss and the risk of several dangerous switches getting thrown that we don’t know about. The best way to stop those trigger points is by stepping back from the precipice by pulling carbon out of the air.

Well, the coral reefs and the extinct species are what I had in mind.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote:

One point that might be ignored is that, despite advanced oil and gas extraction methods, fossil fuels won't be in sufficient supply to maintain the enormous energy flows the world economy depends on. Renewables are needed for both environmental and economic reasons.

The world has several hundred years of coal reserves, but as McKibben explained in his 2012 Rolling Stone article Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, burning the reserves that are factored into the stock prices of the fossil majors would send us on a one way trip to Venus hell, temperature-wise. The only way fossil fuels can avoid the Kodak corporate extinction fate is by working out how to remove more carbon than we add to the air, and using that removed carbon for productive commodities – fuel, food, feed, fertilizer, fabric, fish, forests. I still don’t have much of a sense that they realize the severity of the predicament.

Those reserves are far from sufficient to meet all energy needs, of course. At the current rate of extraction, they will perhaps last for several hundred years and could provide 30% or so of energy needs, but it would be insanity to do that. Looking at oil, the reserves are far less, at current rates of use. The same for gas. Despite the money needed to be diverted to jack up renewables, it would seem only logical not to make the job of removing carbon much more difficult because we've continued to rely on polluting energy industries. I don't get the attitude of "the more the merrier--we can just reap all that carbon and make stuff from it." That is all based on speculation that, first, algae can serve as our only major source of energy, and second, that there will be uses and markets for mined carbon. It seems very risky to pin our hopes on such a prospect.

I can't trust any solution that doesn't lay out changes in habits and lifestyles as a concomitant. It'd be nice if these adjustments weren't needed, but I think there's no chance.

Quote:

Growing algae on 1% of the world ocean, with high yield industrial production fertilized by emissions piped from coal fired power stations, would in my view enable a sustainable world economy and climate repair.

My figuring puts the total sq. miles in algae production at almost 1.5 million, Robert.

I thought the latest from the IPCC did acknowledge the need for removing carbon. I have not read the report, but one summary has this to say: "The UN's latest global warming report made it clear that if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, society urgently needs to move away from fossil fuels completely. But to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report says, we'll also have to figure out how to undo some of the damage that's already been done. 'Given our current knowledge, we can't get to 1.5 degrees without removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it,' said Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute." https://insideclimatenews.org/news/1210 ... nge-report

Thanks for sharing that news report. I think its title, “Emissions Must Go Negative, IPCC Says” involves a misreading of the IPCC report, although I would be happy to be proved wrong.

Reading this fascinating, informative but overall disappointing new report from IPCC, I find little to justify the wishful headline from Inside Climate News of any IPCC recommendation for net negative emissions using carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

Certainly the IPCC extensively discusses CDR technology, and the report acknowledges some need for CDR 'after mid-century' (2-6) to achieve the 1.5C target, but it presents CDR in a distinctly negative tone, as risky and unproven, something to be avoided as far and long as possible through a main focus on emission reduction.

IPCC’s first indicative pathway illustrates this tactic of damning with faint praise, showing CDR limited to forestry and agriculture, despite the possible negative impact on food security. All ideas of ocean based CDR are given a very biased and frosty treatment.

There even seems to be a complacency, with the view that committed warming does not yet exceed 1.5° C, so we still have a 'carbon budget', which could in theory be delivered by the goal of net zero emissions. Science cannot know at this point how much past emissions have committed future warming, something that the geological history of amplifying feedbacks in climate change makes highly likely.

Contrary to the advocacy implied by the Inside Climate News headline, the IPCC report treats net negative emissions only a later fallback method in the event of warming overshoot. CDR should be advocated as a precautionary approach.

The IPCC goal is zero emissions, not negative emissions. This is shown in the Summary for Policy Makers opening Figure 1b, which illustrates this net zero goal by presenting net zero emissions as a hard floor and goal, even though the subsequent Fig 3a shows possible future net negative scenarios.

Overall, I could detect no advocacy for CDR research, investment or improved regulatory frameworks to enable early ramping up of CDR. Instead the overall message seems to accept the political analysis that CDR is a moral hazard that constrains the primary objective of emission reduction. That is highly risky, like a gun to the head.

DWill wrote:

I don't get the attitude of "the more the merrier--we can just reap all that carbon and make stuff from it." That is all based on speculation that, first, algae can serve as our only major source of energy, and second, that there will be uses and markets for mined carbon. It seems very risky to pin our hopes on such a prospect.

What I am suggesting is that the world can achieve a far more balanced and safe climate investment portfolio through a major focus on CDR, or as I prefer to call it, carbon mining, paying for carbon extraction with a focus on making stuff.

Any new industry is based on speculation, and there were similar famous naysayers at the foundation of aviation and computing. The problem here as I see it is that carbon mining is being unduly constrained for political motives that are not well considered. There is a sort of second guessing at work here, that if governments encourage CDR that will take the foot off the throat of the coal industry.

DWill wrote:

I can't trust any solution that doesn't lay out changes in habits and lifestyles as a concomitant. It'd be nice if these adjustments weren't needed, but I think there's no chance.

Making economic solutions beholden to personal morality is a terrible example of the tail wagging the dog, reversing cause and effect. Sure, it is a good thing to advocate for more ethical lifestyles and habits, but that is marginal to climate security. The big problem here is that global warming is a primary security issue, posing serious risks of conflict and collapse for society and ecology. We should not hold our global security hostage to essentially religious arguments about personal morality.

My view, dog wagging tail, is that carbon mining holds strong potential to generate new major sources of wealth while also stabilising the climate. Partnership with the existing energy industry offers a gradual incremental path of evolutionary reform, not a social revolution.

The IPCC core recommendation for radical decarbonisation of the economy is deeply unwise as a political strategy, desirable as it is over the medium term. Decarbonisation as a central goal poses dire risks of intensified political conflict, modelled on the old failed socialist idea of the unity of progressive forces. The biggest risk is a situation where the world economy still has massive emissions, and the climate tips over into a hothouse, but we have still not developed the carbon removal technologies that could save us.

DWill wrote:

My figuring puts the total sq. miles in algae production at almost 1.5 million, Robert.

Yes. Putting it in kilometres, the world ocean is 361 million square kilometres, so 1% of that is 3.6 million, which is 1.4 million square miles. That is a goal to work towards, beginning with safe simple scaleable technologies, such as marine permaculture using kelp forests or using iron chloride to increase plankton growth in the Southern Ocean. More than 60 million square km of the world ocean is classed as desert, with high nutrients but low chlorophyll due to the lack of iron. 71% of our planet is covered by water, so the ocean is the new frontier where we can find the energy, space and resources to convert CO2 into valuable commodities at scale.

In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense—because it sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant.

A soundbite like this regarding the Galileo/Heliocentric/Church saga is often used to vilify religion generally, and more specifically, the Catholic Church. It leaves out important details and historical context.

At the time the Ptolemaic model had more mathematical evidence than did the heliocentric model. Galileo did not at the time have the necessary calculations needed to overturn the Ptolemaic system. This was also a time when "evidence" and what constitutes it came into scrutiny. The scientific community OF THE TIME (CONTEXT!) was seriously debating matters of evidence. Most of Galileo's scientific claims were based on observation, which the church AT THE TIME rightlfully pointed out can be deceptive.

The Ptolemaic model had stood as truth for 1300 years before it was seriously challenged. It was backed by "evidence" that justified its explanans.

The Church played significant social, economic, political, and personal roles in people's lives. Galileo was asked to recant for several reasons, one being the lack of evidence backing heliocentrism.

It is and remains an enormously difficult task to give up a scientific paradigm. I suspect some of our "modern" scientific paradigms will fall one day and be looked on by future generations as silly.

In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense—because it sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant.

A soundbite like this regarding the Galileo/Heliocentric/Church saga is often used to vilify religion generally, and more specifically, the Catholic Church. It leaves out important details and historical context.

At the time the Ptolemaic model had more mathematical evidence than did the heliocentric model. Galileo did not at the time have the necessary calculations needed to overturn the Ptolemaic system. This was also a time when "evidence" and what constitutes it came into scrutiny. The scientific community OF THE TIME (CONTEXT!) was seriously debating matters of evidence. Most of Galileo's scientific claims were based on observation, which the church AT THE TIME rightlfully pointed out can be deceptive.

The Ptolemaic model had stood as truth for 1300 years before it was seriously challenged. It was backed by "evidence" that justified its explanans.

The Church played significant social, economic, political, and personal roles in people's lives. Galileo was asked to recant for several reasons, one being the lack of evidence backing heliocentrism.

It is and remains an enormously difficult task to give up a scientific paradigm. I suspect some of our "modern" scientific paradigms will fall one day and be looked on by future generations as silly.

First, it is thought, there was Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC). "Aristarchus identified the "central fire" with the Sun, and he put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun. Like Anaxagoras before him, he suspected that the stars were just other bodies like the Sun, albeit further away from Earth. He was also the first one to deduce the rotation of Earth on its axis. His astronomical ideas were often rejected in favor of the incorrect geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy."(Wiki)

Not long before Galileo there was Copernicus and his theory of heliocentrism. Since the Copernican Theory was so well-known Galileo published. He had a little problem with, "theRoman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture."(Wiki)

"By the end of his trial, Galileo was forced to recant his own scientific findings as "abjured, cursed and detested," a renunciation that caused him great personal anguish but which saved him from being burned at the stake."-- NY Times OCT. 31, 1992

He was forced to recant and lived out his life under house arrest. By Galileo's day there was more than enough evidence to support his theory just as there had been more than enough evidence to support the Copernican Theory that was based on the work Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC).

"Since then, the Church has taken various steps to reverse its opposition to Galileo's conclusions. In 1757, Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" was removed from the Index, a former list of publications banned by the Church. When the latest investigation, conducted by a panel of scientists, theologians and historians, made a preliminary report in 1984, it said that Galileo had been wrongfully condemned. More recently, Pope John Paul II himself has said that the scientist was "imprudently opposed."-- NY Times

There is no defending the church on this point when the church itself said Galileo had been wrongfully condemned and the Pope said he was imprudently opposed.So keep the rationalizations for the gullible and for those who rent their minds to gods and governments.

_________________Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.— H. L. Mencken

I've done my research. If you can show me anything in that post that isn't true I'll do your research for you as well. But you can't. You can spout your unsubstantiated opinion and laugh all you like, but if you can show nothing that proves my post wrong, you are once again arguing on a third-grade level. This is the adult table -- you won't like it here.

_________________Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.— H. L. Mencken

I've done my research. If you can show me anything in that post that isn't true I'll do your research for you as well. But you can't. You can spout your unsubstantiated opinion and laugh all you like, but if you can show nothing that proves my post wrong, you are once again arguing on a third-grade level. This is the adult table -- you won't like it here.

Thanks for all the info from the Vatican Archives.This will take me some time to sift through. You've provided a lot of material, as you said you would.

I've done my research. If you can show me anything in that post that isn't true I'll do your research for you as well. But you can't. You can spout your unsubstantiated opinion and laugh all you like, but if you can show nothing that proves my post wrong, you are once again arguing on a third-grade level. This is the adult table -- you won't like it here.

Thanks for all the info from the Vatican Archives.This will take me some time to sift through. You've provided a lot of material, as you said you would.

I promise to make my way through it all.

Since through your diligence and researching skills you proved my post wrong, I did your research and sent it over to the kiddie table.

_________________Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.— H. L. Mencken

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